Give Performance Feedback to Their Staff One way otherwise effective top people do performance feedback badly is they don’t do it at all. Or they do it on the fly. Five minutes over a beer. It can be so quickly and informally that the recipient doesn’t know that’s what it was, as the HR leader later finds out. A phantom review. It was said about one CEO, “It’s difficult getting him pinned down for reviews.” Usually there’s no escaping this annual chore, no escaping the iron grip of the performance-management apparatus, fitted out with forms, rating scales, strict deadlines and pesky automated …
There has been a strengths movement sweeping this country. Just recently Bob led a webinar with the Center for Creative Leadership. About 60 percent of the audience of senior HR and Learning & Development executives was familiar with the book Now, Discover Your Strengths and its self-diagnostic tool, the StrengthsFinder. The central idea of the strengths movement is that it’s wrong to focus on trying to fix an executive’s weakness because greatness comes only from building on natural talent. Strengths advocates promote this very worthy idea to stop obsessing about your weaknesses because you’re never going to be great at those …
We’re honored to be featured in the Schumpeter column “Too much of a good thing” in the June 8, 2013 edition, imploring leaders to beware of their strengths. You can read it here.
If you are serious about becoming a more effective leader, you can’t just work on your behavior. You also have to work on your mindset. However in our experience, most executive clients don’t know what subterranean forces impede their effectiveness. One of the most debilitating forces—anxiety—can trigger a dysfunctional tendency to control too much. Certainly, control has its uses. Even at its most inclusive and enabling, leadership is essentially about influencing others. But dysfunctional control—gratuitous intrusions into other people’s space where little is gained and much is lost—is counterproductive and disabling. You know these leaders. They fill their own space and yours too. They …
